Abstract
Easy proofs are given of the impossibility of solving several consensus problems (Byzantine agreement, weak agreement, Byzantine firing squad, approximate agreement and clock synchronization) in certain communication graphs. It is shown that, in the presence of f faults, no solution to these problems exists for communication graphs with fewer than 3f+1 nodes or less than 2f+1 connectivity. While some of these results had been proven previously, the new proofs are much simpler, provide considerably more insight, apply to more general models of computation, and (particularly in the case of clock synchronization) significantly strengthen the results.
Earlier versions of this paper appeared in the ACM Conference Proceedings of PODC 1985, and in Distributed Computing, volume 1 number 1, reprinted by permission.
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© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Fischer, M.J., Lynch, N.A., Merritt, M. (1990). Easy impossibility proofs for distributed consensus problems. In: Simons, B., Spector, A. (eds) Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 448. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0042333
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0042333
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